Eastern and Western Armenian both use the same alphabet, but they pronounce some of the letters differently. If you want to travel to Armenia you need to learn Eastern Armenian. If you want to talk to Armenians in Lebanon, Istanbul, Paris etc. you need to learn Western Armenian.

I have noticed there are two different alphabets in the Armenian language; Eastern and Western.

Which alphabet am I recommended to learn if I want to use it with the majority of Aremenians?

Could you be so kind to tell me where I can find the alphabet online? I did search but I need a recommendation as I will start learning to write by myself.

Thank you beforehand.

Click to expand...

Eastern and Western Armenian use the same alphabet, but there are a handful of (fairly minor) differences in how they use a few of the letters in this alphabet.* The differences between the actual languages written in this alphabet -- Western and Eastern Armenian -- are much, much more significant. There are major differences in the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of both, and people who have only learned one form (Western or Eastern) often have difficulty understanding the other.

If you were going to choose between learning Western and Eastern Armenian, I would personally recommend Eastern, because it's an official state language (in the country of Armenia), and therefore there's a greater amount of up-to-date resources (newspapers, etc.) available for exposing yourself to the language.

I spent a year studying Western Armenian (about 7 years ago), and my experience was that it wasn't easy to practice the language unless you had friends, relatives or acquaintances who spoke it: for example, I don't recall there being any online newspapers in Western Armenian at that time. There may be more Western Armenian resources available now than there were then, but if I don't know if the range and quality of these resources compare to what is available for Eastern.

*For example, Western Armenian has at least three ways of writing the "v" sound (as in English village) in different environments: the letters վ (vev) and ւ (hyun), and the letter combination ու (vo-hyun). Eastern Armenian uses only vev for this sound.